


Light

by flightofangels



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, F/F, Flushed Romance | Matesprits, POV Second Person, Regret, Retrospective, unrealized love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-16
Updated: 2012-06-16
Packaged: 2017-11-07 20:56:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/435359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flightofangels/pseuds/flightofangels
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"There are no words for how much you always have and always will love Vriska Serket."</p><p>In which Kanaya Maryam looks back on the love of her life, now that it's over.</p><p>(Not her love. Her life.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Light

**Author's Note:**

> This is excerpted from a novel-length piece I am still writing, as I realized it was long enough to be a fic in its own right. Those who have been exposed to the full work will notice that certain sentiments it expresses and analogies it draws have been excised: This is because I'm aware certain readers would much prefer to see me explore this matespritship outside of the shadow that fic's plot casts over the original version of this portion of that work. I may later revise this for further expansion that piece forbade when I first wrote this. For now, I just hope you enjoy this bittersweet look at my favorite pair of girls in love that have died at their friends' hands and destroyed them in return.
> 
> Oh, and there's a touch of Jade Harley in here, and also some nice discussion of Kanaya o8< (Tavros, Vriska). I didn't feel comfortable tagging for auspisticism, but I probably should have, considering how very, very woefully neglected ashen romance is, but it's not exactly true greyrom that happens anyway, and only reminiscent in regard. (The violence and death really both aren't that bad, only observed events and not experienced ones, and nothing beyond canon events.)

You no longer believe in luck.

The period during which you did was in fact very brief. Before Sgrub, Skaia’s providence was the primary focus of your belief. You thought there was no such thing as chance, that everything had a very specific reason to take place, a position within Skaia’s ever-so-grand scheme. There were no accidents, only events that looked like them at the time. When she told you she had bad luck, you told her to can it. You found it terribly amusing every time. It was one of the dumb little jokes you had back then, when you were her stupid fussing meddling best friend. Things were better back then, when you had all the cards, when you were both on speaking terms and still alive.

There are no words for how much you always have and always will love Vriska Serket. This is only hyperbole for emotional expansiveness: You know exactly what the words for the form of your affections are. You hold a flammable cave illuminator for her, burning bright mutant blood red with the flames of concupiscent pity. It is a preposterous infatuation, yet at the same time one you have never been able to fully abandon. She’s some stupid simpering shameless senseless spiderbitch but somehow still a kind that costs nowhere near a caegar a dozen on Alternia. She had reasons for being the way she was, great and terrible, and she deserved to kill the hundreds of children she did, if none of them could fight back enough to best her.

(Or it may have been thousands. Only if it were would you actually be given any significant pause. She’s not the only troll to ever live with a demanding lusus. In fact you distinctly recall certain other highbloods fully complicit in the murders that she brought about – but, oh, they “didn’t revel” in having to kill people, or they would tolerate “only just” deaths, so nobody minded. You never made convenient exceptions like that. You just modified your entire moral code, after you met her. That was so much neater.)

Later she broke your heart, of course. But you’ve become fully aware, without even physically returning to the moments, simply looking back at them, that she had no idea what she did to you, and that she didn’t mean to. She just happened to have a misguided crush on a certain piece of shit at all the wrong times. She clearly realized the error of her ways, eventually! For that moment she broke your heart, though, and it was as you lay sobbing in Mother’s spritely embrace that she whispered to you that you loved more than a girl, but a future god, a living Lady All-The-Luck: You were in love with the Thief of Light; what other title could belong to the girl who so effortlessly stole the sunny desert girl’s heart, after all?

(You are so, so, so sorry to Mother – that is your name for her and yours alone. She isn’t your mother, no matter what an insufficiently trained xenopsychologist may assume: She is your _lusus_ , or she is _the_ mother, and Mother is simply your affectionate abbreviation for the latter. She couldn’t speak for very long. You had to read out loud to her. There is nothing about your relationship, however tender, however pedagogical, that is as simple as the banal maternity humans enjoy. She was no adult troll irrationally assigned to the tedious task of child-rearing, and had no motivation to turn to alcoholic venues for her entertainment. You were her charge, her ward; she was your caretaker, your custodian. It’s a little like that mother-daughter-sisterhood she has with the girl sharing her pale hair in her dreams. You’ve never once gotten an analogous encounter involving your configuration of horns. You took her for granted. You knew she would die, you knew she would come back; you didn’t know she would die again, and there was your mistake. You had Mother floating besides you without the matriorb inside her; what more could you want from her than the comfort she was finally able to provide?)

When the Virgin Mother Grub became Mothersprite, that incomprehensible idioglossia of chrrrrrrs and words clearly enunciated to make it through her weak ears had finally been set aside. That was how you learned (or at least were told) that luck existed. It was her aspect: The Thief of Light had a reservoir of the beautiful (blue? in your imagination that was how it always looked; you could never bear to actually follow her progress in the game again after that point, with the dual excuses of abandonment and duty to Bilious Slick) stuff deep within her (or perhaps sparkling without – you were _never_ daring enough to imagine it before you saw it, you didn’t want to disappoint yourself if you ever did, and you certainly weren’t disappointed when the time finally came), gained and lost and stolen and expended in the games of chance she so adored. She loved those more than anything, more than any individual person. You know this because it is one of the only logical explanations for her life and her choices.

(You never played but of course you remember she did, and so well too. At times it seemed like all she ever spent her time on, like she was hatched for it. Considering she was always destined to be the Hero of Light, maybe she literally was, perhaps she came out with dice in one hand and a manual in the other.

The memories of your involvement with her career are so vivid, though. With that bright blue longcoat her flapping in the wind behind her and a handsome eyepatch, how could she lose? There are others you made, but this was the only one in which your ministrations manifested as truly _concupiscent_ , sparkling everywhere. Only one of your outfits ever surpassed that one in all its glittering glory, and it floats within the endless void of the medium now, or lies deep within the oceans of your planet, or perhaps has been burnt up by Jack Noir through shenanigans that brought it closer to the surface.)

So then you understood your entire shared lives (or at least thought you did). She was the Hero of Light, highly strung and subject to chance, while you were meant to be her Sylph, tenderly straightening her course. Not in moirallegiance – someone softer-spoken and meeker than you was needed for a role like that. So many trolls’ cruel jokes about the redness of your feelings missed the entire point: Concupiscence could matter less in matters of the heart. There was a simple warmth with which you regarded her unmoderated self – you wanted to have her, hold her, help and protect her, but never avidly enough to change her. You could have swallowed every fantasy about rainbow drinkers and shadow droppers if you really pitied her so much you needed her to be different, but you didn’t love her in _spite_ of how dangerous she was. You love her _for_ it.

(Jade asked you what you were now, if you weren’t a “vampire” as she called you on first hearing you explain the situation. You said a rainbow drinker. She was surprised by the “sweet but silly” word, and felt the same about you glowing, which rather irks you still, how such a sinister creature of the day as yourself is looked upon as some kind of joke by the species for whom the universe was really constructed upon the species that really constructed it. Then, though, she wanted to know what other creatures of the day there were. Alternia had too many over the course of its long history to be named in full, you explained; however, the “shadow dropper” was among your favorites. Her next unintentional insult was to ask whether these creatures resembled in any way a certain sort of pawn of the Noble Circle. You could not type “No” fast enough, after she regaled you with an unsolicited description of the precise horrors the shadowy tentacles of Derse could inflict upon the human form. A shadow dropper, you explained, is a capricious sort of being dwelling at dusk and dawn or anywhere in between on either side, so free because they can steal shadows as they wish, using the subsequent cast of darkness to protect themselves from the sun’s searing rays. This makes them the perfect complement to the rainbow drinker, who absorbs light and repurposes it into a gentle glow instead. To keep up with a rainbow drinker’s impossible speed, the shadow dropper is blessed with a single pair of impossibly beautiful blood-hued sparkling wings.

So they’re like a fairy??? Haha, stealing shadows kind of like in Peter Pan??

That was her answer to all that prose of yours. No was your reply to that too, because shadow droppers aren’t stupid.)

All this clarity came later, though, after months on end of living alone. You call them months because there are no moons by which to mark the equinoxes or perigees anymore. You call yourself alone because of a proverb you heard once about what the state of being truly along for a troll is, though you can’t remember the exact conditions, only that your current unmoored suspension, however accompanied by three trolls and three others you might technically be, somehow certainly qualifies anyway.

You call it clarity because your mind was clouded back then, when this was part of the veil and not just a meteor, when you had no idea exactly how she went “8eyoooooooond all the levels” and got an impossibly lucky roll as well as her arm and eightfold vision cured. All you knew before having so much time without pestering her was that you wished she would stop pestering you while you were still bitter and broken-hearted with regards to her.

She honestly thought that the score you were settling with him, what you were taking out on him, was an infatuation in _his_ direction. How could she see you slice his legs off starting above the waistline and think you ever wanted him in a concupiscent fashion? Even the ashen attraction you barely remember (actually attempting to give him genuine self-confidence, just as she did, but both efforts were hopeless), if it had survived to that point, hardly could have endured a wound so deep. Something a little more glancing – a slap or something similar, say – you can imagine, if only he weren’t utterly worthless.

You were just so angry at both of them. A troll couldn’t ask for a worse set of auspisticees. If you dwelled on even one of the thousands of reasons why they failed you utterly in the ashen quadrant, you might go on an interminable quest for the existing fractions of their bodies just to slap them silly. The true mental workings of a rainbow drinker are foreign even to you, just as much as the subconscious drives of a troll are to anyone else.

The bodies of the dead should by all rights belong to their comrades in having experienced death, in your opinion, but you’re not exactly positioned to civilly lodge a complaint to the appropriate authorities.

You had none of this insight back then. You were just so angry. You didn’t know what to make of her appearance in your dreambubble, the one where you were still capable of disorientation and bleeding. She was wearing some garish yet alluring orange bodysuit emblazoned with the sun itself. The source of Light, perhaps indicating that as Mother said she would she had somehow become her aspect’s god after all? You barely had time to catch sight of her brilliant sparkling blue wings before, by chance, she caught a bad break and then slipped out of sight.

So when you saw her on the rooftop, at last observed the god of Light in the flesh, you were confused as well as angry, and there was only one way a creature such as yourself could deal with it. She was staring dumbfounded at you with all eight eyes and you raised your fist and pounded it to carve your mark into her perfect silver face, like a fork cutting into wedding cake. She went flying, you went flying, your skirt and everything else fluttered behind you almost as good as wings would be, propelling you into the air like the assertive hero you were now. You had shown her. You had touched her physically the way she had you psychologically. If life were a game like she so loved to claim, then for that moment you had won.

By the time you landed on the ground again you had other matters to which to attend, a pair of shades to let troll serendipity place upon your cephalic surface. As you reapplied your lipstick, though – in preparation for your change of clothing, you needed it to resupply the requisite amount of jade if it would be present in neither your blood nor your symbol anymore – you did not simply let off your average grim shine. Instead, during your gesture of vanity, you sparkled. You think you may have even dazzled her semi-deliberately. It was difficult to determine exactly how she regarded your true form that, like you with hers, she was seeing for the first time. Your new computation device was doing its best to usurp your attention from that particular matter.

The thing about your server player’s broken dark ugly unfashionable shades is that they may be the only thing left in paradox space that can cloud your vampire’s vision.

You know now you made a grave mistake up on the roof that night, when you left before tending to her, letting her nurse whatever wounds you had inflicted alone without her Sylph’s services. That was something you shouldn’t have done, you think, really, because wouldn’t a new universe without Doom be much better than one lacking Light, but Doom was what you found when you went downstairs and Light was what your life lacked when you came back up.

There was a sickening smell everywhere as soon as you cleared the division between below and above the roof, something so sweet that for the first time since your death you had an active desire to breathe. You realized as light sparked behind your eyes that it was her blood, playing a beautiful melody that put blue raspberry Jell-O or lemons and mustard or even dizzyingly rarified troll French claret to shame. It was perfectly clear to you then that there was a deeper reason that punching her made you think of a spoon digging into sublime silvery ice cream.

The realization that the source of this bloody bounty came from a backstabbing wound followed soon after, but in your reverie it took several seconds to sink in. There was no time for justifications, with her murderer suddenly on the scene – _the_ murderer, that is, you have no idea why you refer to him in the possessive whenever possible regardless of whether it fits except perhaps out of your obsessive fixation upon his utter unconscionability.

It was only much later that you could question the Seer on what exactly being the god of Light meant, and why the fact that she had been coerced into making a heroic sacrifice to prevent Jack Noir from finding them was so significant. You found out then that there are situations where luck doesn’t matter at all, and have since come to the logical conclusion that upon the death of its god luck ceased to exist. So it was that you came to live (or be undead) in a universe where Doom and Rage flourish while luck or Light does not, and you drift through endless dark daynights without the emotional strength to make your situation brighter. You are almost always plaintively pale these nightdays, without more than the slightest glow forced to assure a Seer that you have no need to be asked whether your current state is a physiological symptom of depression.

(Naturally, whenever a situation forces you to opine on the universe’s newfound lack of luck, there are others here who counter there’s still a perfectly good god tier hero of Light right here in the middle of paradox space. You have long since despaired of making them comprehend that under no circumstances do you consent to worship an inferior imposter whose interpretation of the aspect more greatly resembles fortune anyway.)


End file.
